Saying Bye to Obama
I cried over the election for the first time on the night before President Trump’s inauguration. I had felt sad since November 8th, but my sadness had quickly hardened into disgust and disillusionment with the president elect and the people who put him there. My anger was overpowering and I hadn’t yet gotten in touch with the immense sense of loss our country was about to sustain.
It finally hit me during a video posted by my friend, Caeli, an unwavering activist in the fight for women’s equality. The video described the origin of President Obama’s “fired up, ready to go” chant. You can hear Obama’s smile crinkle as he’s speaking, telling the story of how an elderly woman, sitting in the back of a room on a rainy morning in South Carolina, began a chant that would become Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan. You could sense his amusement and affection for her in his voice, and I got that warm sensation in my stomach that you get when you’re with someone who makes you feel safe.
I then found myself googling pictures of Obama holding babies. I know I sound ridiculous right now, but it’s true. I must have tearfully scrolled through about fifty of them before I snapped out of my nostalgic haze and asked myself what the heck I was doing. Get it together, Emily. This is the political process. Presidents come and go all the time. But then why do I feel like I have just lost someone very close to me when I’ve never even met this man?
I think it is because, for the first time in my adult life, it feels like we are losing a leader who is a really good person.
A leader who, regardless of his politics, viscerally cared about us. Yes, a lot of people got frustrated with him, or feel like he didn’t deliver on his message. But if you look at the many changes he was able to enact, despite being pitted against a Congress who made it their mission to reject every single piece of legislation he could muster, you’ll see that his efforts have one thing in common. They strive to give us the basic tools we deserve to live safe and productive lives. Expanded health coverage, equal pay for equal work, assurances against big banks using our hard-earned money to make risky investments for their own profit, holding Wall Street responsible for singlehandedly causing the Great Recession, protection against being fired if your boss finds out you’re gay, saving as many as 1 million jobs in the American auto industry, protecting the environment, and creating clean energy jobs. The list goes on. Whether or not you liked him, one thing cannot be denied: Obama tried his best to make our lives better and more equal. And he did it without making us turn against each other.
Donald Trump won because he made us divided.
Trump exploited a basic principle of social psychology whereby, if people are fearful and desperate enough, they can latch onto ideologies that promise their place in the natural order of things will be restored.
They can unite against a common out-group, even if that out-group is a scapegoat for the true, more complicated story.
Despite my anger at him, this is not an exercise in Trump-bashing. Although I disagree with his politics, I share in the anger his supporters feel over a broken government system. The people who voted for Trump, much like those of us who voted for Obama back in 2008, are aching to be recognized and their frustrations legitimized. If I, like many of President Trump’s constituents, had to witness the shutting down of factory after factory, or watch my mom and dad lose their jobs and hundreds of other working families lose their livelihood through no fault of their own, I’d be ready to reject the establishment government figureheads who clearly don’t give a damn about me, or my family. These people deserve to be heard and their issues resolved.
But in the process of fixing what’s broken, we don’t get to be hateful. We don’t get to be discriminatory. We get to be adults, who, by virtue of existing in this country, enter into a contract of human decency. Trump has crumpled up that contract and lit it on fire.
We’re transitioning from a leader who cared about everyone to a leader who cares about himself. But instead of being despondent, I am hopeful.
In the past two weeks, I have witnessed an outpouring of Americans’ strength of character; from the Women’s March on Washington to the airport protests that erupted over Trump’s immigration ban. Although I don’t think we’ve elected a particularly good person, this country is made up of particularly good people. This is a government for the people, by the people. And we are fired up, we are ready to go.
